Key roles: Harriet Harman and husband Jack Dromey. They were leading officials in the NCCL, which was linked to predatory pedophile group PIE

The full extent of the shocking links between three senior Labour figures and a vile group that tried to legalise sex with children can be exposed today.

The trio held key roles in a human rights organisation that supported the notorious Paedophile Information Exchange.

Labour’s deputy leader Harriet Harman, her husband, home affairs spokesman Jack Dromey, and former health secretary Patricia Hewitt were all leading officials in the National Council for Civil Liberties.

Astonishingly this Left-wing group granted ‘affiliate’ status to PIE and built close links with it.

The group of predatory paedophiles was calling for the age of consent to be cut to just four.

Police are now investigating PIE as part of Operation Fernbridge, launched in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal.

A senior source on the investigation says there is evidence PIE members were abusing children ‘on an industrial scale’.

The Home Office is also probing shocking claims that the Labour government of the 1970s may have helped finance the paedophile group.

Civil servants are trawling through decades of files after an ‘insider’ claimed tens of thousands of pounds were funnelled to PIE in the form of annual grants to the network of child abusers while James Callaghan was in Downing Street.

* NCCL lawyers acted for a PIE member who was quizzed by police over appalling behaviour.

The Mail has repeatedly sent detailed questions to Miss Harman, Miss Hewitt and Mr Dromey about their links to PIE and whether they now regret supporting such a vile group. Neither Miss Hewitt nor Mr Dromey replied.

A spokesman for Miss Harman said: ‘This story is untrue and ridiculous.’

Leading figure: Former Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. She was general secretary of the NCCL from 1974-1983

In December, when the Mail first drew attention to the links between the NCCL and PIE, a public apology was issued by Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty, which is the name the NCCL now goes under.

Miss Chakrabarti, who was born in 1969 and had nothing to do with the sordid affair, said: ‘It is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the Seventies.

‘The most important lesson learned by Liberty over the subsequent 30 years was to become a well-governed modern human rights movement in which protecting the vulnerable, especially children, will always come first.’

The NCCL was part of the radical Left lobbying for a change in the law to reflect a more ‘enlightened’ attitude to sex between adults and minors and promote the ‘human rights’ of paedophiles.

Harriet Harman, former legal officer at the National Council for Civil Liberties

Miss Hewitt was general secretary of the NCCL from 1974-83. Miss Harman was a newly-qualified solicitor when she became the NCCL’s legal officer in 1978 until 1982, when she entered Parliament. Mr Dromey sat on the NCCL executive committee for almost a decade, from 1970 to 1979.

The extraordinary links between PIE and the NCCL emerge in archives of internal NCCL documents held at the University of Hull and the London School of Economics. PIE’s campaigning in the 1970s caused public outrage.

The group’s members did not present themselves as child abusers but as ‘child lovers’ keen to ‘liberate’ children from sexual ‘repression’.

In 1978, Miss Harman wrote a briefing paper on the Protection of Children Bill, which sought to ban child pornography.

She claimed such a law would ‘increase censorship’ and argued that a pornographic picture of a naked child should not be considered indecent unless it could be proven that the subject had suffered.

In 1976, the NCCL filed a submission to a parliamentary committee claiming a proposed bill to protect children from sex abusers would ‘lead to damaging and absurd prosecutions’.

‘Childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in , with an adult result in no identifiable damage,’ it read. ‘The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.’

In 1982, Miss Hewitt published ‘The Police and Civil Liberties’, in which she discussed the jailing of PIE secretary Tom O’Carroll for conspiracy to corrupt public morals.

She wrote: ‘Conspiring to corrupt public morals is an offence incapable of definition or precise proof.’ After the Daily Mail highlighted the connection between the NCCL and PIE in December, a spokesman for Miss Harman said: ‘The very suggestion that Harriet was in any way supportive of the PIE or its aims is untrue and misleading.’

The Metropolitan Police began Operation Fernbridge in January 2013 into allegations that residents of a children's home in Richmond, West London, were taken to the nearby Elm Guest House in Barnes, where they were abused.